Hi, I experience some problems with the sound. I use Debian unstable with the efika repo and debian-multimedia.

I have imx-essential installed.

Playing some audio and also video files, I hear sound, others not. Formats that work everytime are flac and wav, for video aac. Ogg gives never sound and mp3 gives no sound with one exception.

I tried with totem, mplayer, and clementine. Any suggestions?

Other perhaps relevant packages I have installed:

i gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio - GStreamer plugin for PulseAudio
i A imx-pulseaudio-config - forces alsa to route through pulseaudio
i A libpulse-mainloop-glib0 - PulseAudio client libraries (glib support)
i A libpulse0 - PulseAudio client libraries
i pulseaudio - PulseAudio sound server
i pulseaudio-esound-compat - PulseAudio ESD compatibility layer
i pulseaudio-utils - Command line tools for the PulseAudio soun
i vlc-plugin-pulse - PulseAudio plugin for VLC
i A libasound2 - shared library for ALSA applications
i libasound2-plugins - ALSA library additional plugins
i A gir1.2-gstreamer-0.10 - Description: GObject introspection data fo
i gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg - FFmpeg plugin for GStreamer
i gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 - Fluendo mp3 decoder GStreamer plugin
i gstreamer0.10-fsl-mm-plugins - Freescale Multimedia Gstreamer Plugin for
i A gstreamer0.10-gconf - GStreamer plugin for getting the sink/sour
i A gstreamer0.10-nice - ICE library (GStreamer plugin)
i gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad - GStreamer plugins from the "bad" set
i A gstreamer0.10-plugins-base - GStreamer plugins from the "base" set
i A gstreamer0.10-plugins-good - GStreamer plugins from the "good" set
i gstreamer0.10-plugins-really-ba - GStreamer plugins from the "bad" set
i gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly - GStreamer plugins from the "ugly" set
i gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio - GStreamer plugin for PulseAudio
i A gstreamer0.10-x - GStreamer plugins for X11 and Pango
i A libgstreamer-plugins-bad0.10-0 - GStreamer development files for libraries
i A libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 - GStreamer libraries from the "base" set
i A libgstreamer0.10-0 - Core GStreamer libraries and elements

You can try editing /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and make sure this line is in the file
resample-method = ffmpeg

that should make things behave much better. I plan on helping improve the pulse audio settings package with changes like this (and also a pulse audio profile for the efika) very soon.

Thanks, that helped. With some files, there is sometimes a still a clicking noise, but at least they are played. I think, there is still potential for improvement and optimisation. But nevertheless, thank you for your prompt answer.

If you don't use HDMI for sound, you could get rid of '''imx-pulseaudio-config''' and pulseaudio all together. I switched from GNOME recently because of pulseaudio: it can't be really used without it, but pulseaudio degrades sound quality even on lot more powerful machines (even my Core i5 laptop).

I removed pulseaudio and friends, namely imx-pulseaudio-config, gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio, pulseaudio-esound-compat, pulseaudio-utils, vlc-plugin-pulse, and pavucontrol.

libpulse0 and libpulse-mainloop-glib0 are needed by mplayer and gwenview, respectively.

Then I installed alsa (alsa-base, alsa-utils, alsa-oss) and rebooted. Now I cannot open alsamixer or amixer which means, I cannot change the volume and such.

I get the following error message:




The missing file is in libasound2-plugins. After install this, a get that message:



I'll remove mplayer and gwenview and report, but I use these two very often.

Any (other) suggestions?

So, I just removed mplayer, gwenview and some other packages needing pulseaudio, like chromium or gnash and purged the packages.

As a picture viewer I use xzgv now. And totem does a good job. For sound files clementine is a very nice piece of software.

There's still another issues concerning video, but for this I'll open a new thread.

The pulseaudio libraries don't do any harm, if the pulseaudio server and /etc/asound.conf (coming from imx-pulseaudio-config) are removed. As you can see, these libraries are dependencies for many applications, but they are not used as long as there is no server and configuration.

You can think of pulseaudio as an additional layer in the audio system. It can do many interesting things for PA aware apps, like setting volume for each application, easy output selection, which is useful for HDMI sound. But as an additional layer, it needs CPU, which is a limited resource on the EFIKA MX, and has an effect on sound quality even where CPU power is not a limitation.

I first realized the disadvantages of PA on the EFIKA MX, as CPU made it there even worse, and then made the switch also on my company laptop.

BTW: the EFIKA MX headphones output, once PA is removed, is comparable to high end systems, even if just 48kHz. Here is what I tested a few weekends ago: https://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/2012/0 ... ets-linux/ :)

Okay, I reinstalled the programs I needed and they work fine except linphone.

First, if I do a echo test call to 500@ekiga.net I do not hear anything, but the microphone index shows activity. If I plug in some headphones, the microphone is disabled.

Where to start debugging this? I think, I use only alsa and no pulseaudio.

I just made a test using a call out service and called myself on a fixed phone which worked. So, either the echo test call is broken or there's another problem which would inhibit p2p calls.

The problem that the micro is disabled with headphones plugged in remains and is really annoying.